Finished my first cmoy amp

What a sense of accomplishment I feel right now! I just finished constructing a basic cmoy portable headphone amp (by far my largest electronics project thus far), and it sounds wonderful through my Grado SR-60's and Etymotics ER-4P's w/ Dan Pumphrey's 4P-to-4S adapter, driven by my Panasonic SL-CT780. The amp drives both sets of headphones to high levels, with no distortion or added noise. It's quite amazing!

One note to potential DIYers... this project was expensive for me, mainly because I did not have most of the equipment needed (decent drill, 25 W soldering iron, etc.). Also, it was time-consuming, and I slept less than usual last night, because I was so eager to finish the amp. However, this was incredibly rewarding and educational to me.

Thanks to cmoy and all the other Headwizers / Head-fi'ers for posting their design, layout, and construction tips. That Pac-Tec case was a pain to deal with! Now I really respect the ingenuity and skill of DIYers.

Here are some pictures. My amp's not nearly as nice looking as some of the others I've seen in other threads, but it's the best I could do in my limited time -- I only had last night and this morning. I'll make better-looking (and performing) amps in the future, provided my girlfriend doesn't kill me first. In the meantime, I'll listen to my amp and wait for JMT to get to building my Altoids-amp. (He's just amazing, and I don't have the time to deal with something so small and error-prone now!)

Man... those pins on the Panasonic pot are tiny and close together! I fiddled around with it for a while, then decided to break off a piece off the Vector CircBoard, so I can solder the pins to the board's buses, then solder wires to another part of the bus.